Ashes in the Snow (2018)
★★½ — Ashes in the Snow (2018)
Ashes in the Snow (2018) arrives as one of the few English-language films to reckon seriously with a chapter of twentieth-century history that remains largely unknown outside the Baltic states: the mass deportation of Lithuanian civilians ordered by Stalin in June 1941. Over the course of a single night, Soviet authorities removed tens of thousands of people from their homes, loading them onto freight trains bound for labour camps in Siberia and the Altai region. The deportations continued in waves throughout the 1940s, and the human cost was enormous. For Lithuania, a country that had only recently been absorbed into the Soviet Union, it was among the most traumatic events in a century already crowded with trauma. That a film dramatising these events was made at all, and with an English-speaking cast aimed at an international audience, is itself worth noting.
The film is directed by Marius Markevicius, a Lithuanian-American filmmaker perhaps best known for his documentary work, including the well-received The Other Dream Team (2012), which charted the Lithuanian basketball team's journey at the 1992 Olympics. Moving into drama here, Markevicius adapts the novel of the same name by Ruta Sepetys, whose book became a significant young adult bestseller and drew considerable attention to this forgotten episode. The production is a Lithuanian-American co-production between Tauras Films and Sorrento Productions, a collaboration that gives the film something of a dual identity: rooted in Lithuanian historical memory but packaged for a broader, English-speaking viewership. If you're interested in another Lithuanian production covered on this blog, the review of Tevanik (2014) is worth a read for a sense of how Lithuanian cinema approaches its own stories. At the centre of Ashes in the Snow is Bel Powley as the sixteen-year-old Lina Vilkas, an aspiring artist whose drawings become her means of bearing witness to the horrors around her. Powley, a British actress who came to wider attention through The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), brings considerable range to the role, balancing adolescent vulnerability with a quiet, growing resolve. Lisa Loven Kongsli plays her mother, Jonas Hauer-King her younger brother, and Martin Wallström and Peter Franzén round out a cast that is, on paper, polished but notably international for a story so specifically Lithuanian in its setting and subject. The romantic element of the story, understated as it is, places the film in a tradition of wartime coming-of-age drama that also deals in first love and loss, a territory covered from very different angles in reviews here like Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Mustang (2015), the latter another drama centred on young women under systems of violent control.
A-Z World Movie Tour Lithuania I went into Ashes in the Snow expecting a story. What I got was a punch to the gut and a history lesson I didn’t know I was missing. Set during Stalin’s brutal deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia and the Altai region, this film pulls no punches in depicting the sheer horror of Soviet-era repression. It follows 16-year-old Lina and her family as they’re ripped from their home, thrown onto cattle trains, and sent to a labor camp where survival is a daily miracle. The cold isn’t just weather, it’s a character. A relentless, bone-deep force that strips away warmth, hope, and eventually, life itself. What makes this so powerful is how grounded it feels. No melodrama, no over-the-top speeches, just ordinary people enduring the unimaginable. You feel every rationed spoonful of soup, every frostbitten toe, every whispered prayer for escape. The cinematography captures both the stark beauty and the suffocating bleakness of Siberia, the kind of place where even the sun looks like it regrets being there. And yet, amid all the suffering, there’s defiance. Lina sketches her world in secret, documenting the atrocities with charcoal and stolen scraps of paper. Her art becomes an act of rebellion, a way to say, “We were here. We mattered.” It’s sickening (and tragically necessary) to be reminded of what the USSR did to Lithuania and the other Baltic states. This wasn’t war. This wasn’t justice. This was state-sponsored erasure. Over 130,000 Lithuanians were taken. 70% were women and children. Many never came back. And yet… how many of us knew this before watching a movie? That’s the real crime, not just the camps, but the silence that followed.
Films like this one sit with me longer than the more polished, awards-ready dramas that come and go each season. There's something about knowing the history is real, that the people on screen are stand-ins for actual families who were put on those trains, that makes it harder to simply file away under "watched it, liked it, moving on." I went in knowing virtually nothing about the Lithuanian deportations, and I came out feeling, frankly, a bit embarrassed about that gap. If the film does nothing else, it sends you to a search engine at half eleven at night, and that's not nothing. It's not a perfect film, and it doesn't need to be. Sometimes a story just needs to be told, and heard.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-07-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Ashes in the Snow (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
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Physical: Amazon US
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